Real Food for Everyone

Cooking Tip: You’ll need to melt the coconut oil before measuring it. In a small saucepan, place 2 generous tablespoons of solid coconut oil over the lowest heat and melt. Once it’s liquid, measure to 2 tablespoons of oil.

Variations: It’s fun to experiment with some of the superfoods, but don’t let these unusual ingredients or their unavailability turn you away from making granola: While they are easily found in many areas in natural foods stores, you may choose to substitute dried coconut, cranberries, cherries, dates, or figs. Golden raisins add a beautiful color, but any black raisin or currant will do. Feel free to use your favorite nuts and seeds; I often use walnuts, pecans, or hazelnuts.

Even though hippies helped to ignite the popularity of granola in the 1960s right along with the natural foods movement, the first boxes of main- stream, commercially prepared granola didn’t hit the shelves until 1972. I went to college in the 1970s and missed the height of the hippie movement, but I can remember eating granola out of a box for many a meal. It was inexpensive, it gave me energy, and I loved the ease of it: At that time, I had no clue how to cook anything, so sweet, crunchy granola and a carton of milk made for a perfect meal in my dorm room. Little did I know then that this exact time period marked a veritable granola revival all over the country, as the natural foods movement took hold and what had once been limited to health enthusiasts went mainstream. “Granula,” as it was first called, was made from graham flour and resembled oversized Grape-Nuts. Dr. James Caleb Jackson, who ran a health spa in Dansville, New York, won bragging rights for being the first to make and sell it in the late 1800s. Around the same time, Dr. John

Harvey Kellogg developed a similar cereal—and only renamed it “Granola” when he got into legal issues with Jackson. When the colorful 1960s kicked off granola’s enduring popularity, rolled oats were the recipe’s main ingredient. By the 1970s, there were several people who claimed to have revived or re-invented granola. One was Layton Gentry—no kin of mine—who developed a successful recipe and sold it to two companies: The first was Sovex Natural Foods in Tennessee, whose granola sales were over $1 million in 1971.

The Evolution of Granola

After buying back the western U.S. rights from Sovex, Gentry then sold the recipe to Lassen Foods in California. Time magazine profiled Gen- try in 1972, calling him “Johnny Granola-Seed.” These days, I’m happy to continue the ever- evolving tradition of refining granola’s recipe to create a breakfast cereal that’s packed with nutri- tion. Using my Super Hippie Granola (page 21) as inspiration, feel free to adapt it with your own mix of favorite fruits, nuts, and seeds.

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